History of Basic Oxygen Steelmaking Basic oxygen steelmaking (BOS) is the process of making steel by blowing pure oxygen (O2) in a liquid metal bath contained in a vessel which is known as basic oxygen furnace (BOF), LD converter, or simply converter. The history of steelmaking began in the 19th century, when Reaumur of France in 1772, Kelly of the United States in 1850 and Bessemer of Britain in 1856 discovered how to improve on pig iron by controlling the carbon content of iron alloys, which thus truly become steels. While Reaumur, a chemist, was driven by scientific curiosity, but Kerry and Bessemer being engineers, were responding to the need for larger quantities and better qualities of steel which the industrial revolution, with its looms, steam engines, machines and railroads, had created. This had started a dialectical relationship between science and technology and the basic concepts of refining hot metal (pig iron) by oxidizing carbon (C) in a liquid bath were invented at that time. This was a radical change from the gas-solid reaction in the shaft furnaces, the predecessors of blast furnaces which reduce iron ore with charcoal, or from the puddling of iron which was a forging and refining technology carried out in the solid state and which has no equivalent in the present time. The intensity of innovations which at the second half of the 19th century was impressive and it brought a paradigm shift. Steel making by Bessemer converter came into existence in 1856, the open hearth furnace, which can melt scrap in addition to refining hot metal, was discovered nine years only after the Bessemer converter in 1865, and the basic Thomas converter twelve years later in 1877. The Thomas converter was using air for the refining of the...